Performing, Translating, Fashioning: Spectatorship in the Surveillant World

Abstract

Despite the disciplinary power of surveillance, I argue artistic performances may also provide a space of resistance and self-fashioning. Discussions on artistic performance emphasize the ambivalence and uncertainty of art to resist existing power structures and create alternative meaning. However, how concretely, and when, do artistic performances challenge these structures often remains uncertain. Their popularity does not guarantee the depth of their engagement with surveillance practices, and apparent resistance may hide unconscious cooptation and blatant reproduction of existing inequalities and power structures. To understand the political effect of artistic performances, I argue one needs to look at how they participate to the redefinition of individual and collective selves. This must include attention to spectatorship as a different category from state and corporate surveillance. Spectators engage with performers, reinforce or deny their claim to self-fashioning. By looking at spectators one can better understand how a performance can be (or fail to be) self-fashioning not only for the performer but also collectively for the spectators.

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